Musings from Ballantine 666
R is a really interesting sound. Or rather, it's a letter that has an interesting range of possible pronunciations. It can be rolled or glided in the back of the throat like in some dialects of German, trilled in the front like in various Spanish dialects, or pronounced as a fairly tight, fluid liquid up against either the palate or alveolar ridge, like in English. In some Asian languages, R and L aren't well defined,
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...“Hope is the thing with feathers. / It perches in the soul.” – Emily Dickinson
I have been thinking and talking about hope a lot this year, and especially in the last few weeks. There have been many times that I have felt profoundly hopeless, but strangely, I find the little bird in my soul reawakening as we head into the final month of 2020 and the bleakest, shortest days of the month.
...We see fate unfold in complex and interesting ways in all kinds of stories. Whether showing us how a complex series of events can lead to one crucial moment, persuading us that our actions - no matter how small - have true meaning, or just entertaining us with the fantastic hypotheticals of time travel and the web of consequences that it might weave, Destiny clearly plays an important role in the stories we tell.
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My dad just sent a picture of a majestic buck standing in the yard of my childhood home, with my parents’ dormant vegetable garden in the background. Right now, with the blog and the book ever-present in my mind, I was reminded of my first ever attempt at writing an essay for Superman and God, one that arose from an advocatus diaboli argument Jon and I were having one Sunday morning at the IU library.
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...We are what we do. The world, be it our closest friends and families or the general public, will remember us for the impact that we have on it. When people meet and ask each other "what do you do?", we tend to answer with our career, not a description of our hobbies and personal activities. But what if you're all meeting in the context of a new job, or a new academic program? For example, when I started working at UNC Chapel Hill in 2011, my new coworkers didn't ask me "what do you do". They asked...
...Near the end of her book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, psychology professor Kristin Neff asks if you could go back in time and change something, would you do it even if it meant you would no longer be you? For a lot of years, perhaps decades even, my answer would have been an emphatic "yes!" But recently, a series of experiences and decisions conspired to bring me to this moment,
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...Superman and God is the brainchild of Rachel Bachmann and Jonathan Tweedy. Beginning as an arbitrary book title suggestion in the Fall of 2001, it gained traction in our minds over the years, simmered on the back burner through the ups and downs and twists and turns of our lives and our friendship, and then started to boil over when we reconnected several years ago. Initially intended to be a collection of essays, it evolved from a book idea into a blog idea because of the immense diversity of the discussions that we find ourselves wrapped up in whenever we talk.
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